A lot of folks want to marry their special soulmate, and there are many books to help get you there, but I thought I might discuss a mathematical approach that optimizes your chance of marrying the very best under some quite-odd assumptions. The set of assumptions is sometimes called “the fussy suitor problem” or the secretary problem. It’s sometimes presented as a practical dating guide, e.g. in a recent Washington Post article. My take, is that it’s not a great strategy for dealing with the real world, but neither is it total nonsense.

The basic problem was presented by Martin Gardner in Scientific American in 1960 or so. Assume you’re certain you can get whoever you like (who’s single); assume further that you have a good idea of the number of potential mates you will meet, and that you can quickly identify who is better than whom; you have a desire to marry none but the very best, but you don’t know who’s out there until you date, and you’ve an the inability to go back to someone you’ve rejected. This might be he case if you are a female engineering student studying in a program with 50 male engineers, all of whom have easily bruised egos. Assuming the above, it is possible to show, using Riemann Integrals (see solution here), that you maximize your chance of finding Mr/Ms Right by dating without intent to marry 36.8 % of the fellows (1/e), and then marrying the first fellow who’s better than any of the previous you’ve dated. I have a simpler, more flexible approach to getting the right answer, that involves infinite serieses; I’ll hope to show off some version of this at a later date.

With this strategy, one can show that there is a 63.2% chance you will marry someone, and a 36.8% you’ll wed the best of the bunch. There is a decent chance you’ll end up with number 2. You end up with no-one if the best guy appears among the early rejects. That’s a 36.8% chance. If you are fussy enough, this is an OK outcome: it’s either the best or no-one. I don’t consider this a totally likely assumption, but it’s not that bad, and I find you can recalculate fairly easily for someone OK with number 2 or 3. The optimal strategy then, I think, is to date without intent at the start, as before, but to take a 2nd or 3rd choice if you find you’re unmarried after some secondary cut off. It’s solvable by series methods, or dynamic computing.

It’s unlikely that you have a fixed passel of passive suitors, of course, or that you know nothing of guys at the start. It also seems unlikely that you’re able to get anyone to say yes or that you are so fast evaluating fellows that there is no errors involved and no time-cost to the dating process. The Washington Post does not seem bothered by any of this, perhaps because the result is “mathematical” and reasonable looking. I’m bothered, though, in part because I don’t like the idea of dating under false pretense, it’s cruel. I also think it’s not a winning strategy in the real world, as I’ll explain below.

One true/useful lesson from the mathematical solution is that it’s important to learn from each date. Even a bad date, one with an unsuitable fellow, is not a waste of time so long as you leave with a better sense of what’s out there, and of what you like. A corollary of this, not in the mathematical analysis but from life, is that it’s important to choose your circle of daters. If your circle of friends are all geeky engineers, don’t expect to find Prince Charming among them. If you want Prince Charming, you’ll have to go to balls at the palace, and you’ll have to pass on the departmental wine and cheese.

The assumptions here that you know how many fellows there are is not a bad one, to my mind. Thus, if you start dating at 16 and hope to be married by 32, that’s 16 years of dating. You can use this time-frame as a stand in for total numbers. Thus if you decide to date-for-real after 37%, that’s about age 22, not an unreasonable age. It’s younger than most people marry, but you’re not likely to marry the fort person you meet after age 22. Besides, it’s not great dating into your thirties — trust me, I’ve done it.

The biggest problem with the original version of this model, to my mind, comes from the cost of non-marriage just because the mate isn’t the very best, or might not be. This cost gets worse when you realize that, even if you meet prince charming, he might say no; perhaps he’s gay, or would like someone royal, or richer. Then again, perhaps the Kennedy boy is just a cad who will drop you at some time (preferably not while crossing a bridge). I would therefor suggest, though I can’t show it’s optimal that you start out by collecting information on guys (or girls) by observing the people around you who you know: watch your parents, your brothers and sisters, your friends, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Listen to their conversation and you can get a pretty good idea of what’s available even before your first date. If you don’t like any of them, and find you’d like a completely different circle, it’s good to know early. Try to get a service job within ‘the better circle’. Working with people you think you might like to be with, long term, is a good idea even if you don’t decide to marry into the group in the end.

Once you’ve observed and interacted with the folks you think you might like, you can start dating for real from the start. If you’re super-organized, you can create a chart of the characteristics and ‘tells’ of characteristics you really want. Also, what is nice but not a deal-breaker. For these first dates, you can figure out the average and standard deviation, and aim for someone in the top 5%. A 5% target is someone whose two standard deviations above the average. This is simple Analysis of variation math (ANOVA), math that I discussed elsewhere. In general you’ll get to someone in the top 5% by dating ten people chosen with help from friends. Starting this way, you’ll avoid being unreasonably cruel to date #1, nor will you loose out on a great mate early on.

After a while, you can say, I’ll marry the best I see, or the best that seems like he/she will say yes (a smaller sub-set). You should learn from each date, though, and don’t assume you can instantly size someone up. It’s also a good idea to meet the family since many things you would not expect seem to be inheritable. Meeting some friends too is a good idea. Even professionals can be fooled by a phony, and a phony will try to hide his/her family and friends. In the real world, dating should take time, and even if you discover that he/ she is not for you, you’ll learn something about what is out there: what the true average and standard deviation is. It’s not even clear that people fall on a normal distribution, by the way.

Don’t be too upset if you reject someone, and find you wish you had not. In the real world you can go back to one of the earlier fellows, to one of the rejects, if one does not wait too long. If you date with honesty from the start you can call up and say, ‘when I dated you I didn’t realize what a catch you were’ or words to that effect. That’s a lot better than saying ‘I rejected you based on a mathematical strategy that involved lying to all the first 36.8%.’

Robert Buxbaum, December 9, 2019. This started out as an essay on the mathematics of the fussy suitor problem. I see it morphed into a father’s dating advice to his marriage-age daughters. Here’s the advice I’d given to one of them at 16. I hope to do more with the math in a later post.